Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago

My Life, My Work, My Art

Jose Gamaliel Gonzalez

Publication Year: 2010

Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jose Gamaliel Gonzalez, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, Gonzalez looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home._x000B__x000B_Born near Monterrey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, Gonzalez studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento ArtÃ­stico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s. _x000B__x000B_With numerous illustrations, this book portrays Gonzalez's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, and his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Preface

I wish to acknowledge the help of Nicolás Kanellos
and his staff at Arte Público Press for finding
key materials and scanning many photos
from José’s private collection. Thanks to Mario
Castillo, Jeff Huebner, Lennie Domínguez, and
Gilberto Cárdenas, as well as José’s former wife
(and my former colleague), Mary Kay Vaughan, ...

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I first met José Gamaliel González when I began
working as coordinator of the Rafael Cintrón
Ortiz Latino Student Cultural Center at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. Part of
my job was to meet and work with people in
the community, and one of my new colleagues,
Mary Kay Vaughan, told me I had to meet her
ex-husband and father of her child Alicia, ...

Invocation: Some Framing Thoughts

This will be the story of my life—my work as a
Mexican artist and arts promoter in Chicago’s
Mexican community. There’s so much to tell,
and I’m not sure I can tell it all. Sometimes I
think I’m losing memory. I remember the order
and dates of things and the things more or
less, but I seem to leave out the details. ...

1. The Early Years (1933-55)

My mother’s father was from Durango,
Mexico, I think, but he’d gone to the Midwest
when she was pretty young. My father came up
to East Chicago, Indiana, as a migrant worker.
They met in the early thirties, during the Depression,
at a time when a lot of Mexicans were
being sent back from Chicago to Mexico. ...

2. From High School to Notre Dame (1955-71)

I graduated high school, but I didn’t go to work.
Instead I went to study art at the Chicago Academy
of Fine Arts for a year. The school no longer
exists, but it was near the corner of Rush
Street and Chicago Avenue in the heart of the
Gold Coast, the city’s key nightlife area for tourists.
It was there that I learned to draw and paint
watercolors (fig. 10). ...

3. The MARCH Years (1971-79)

First, I went back to Hammond because
that’s where I lived with my mother, and it
was in Hammond that I began to get involved
with some local Latino organizations. There’s
no question that leaving Notre Dame meant a
long period of confusion and disorientation for
me. I supported myself by taking on part-time
freelance work in Chicago. ...

4. Raíces, MIRA, and the MFAC (1979-92)

It seemed that most of what I’d been building
was now in ruins, but that was really not the
case. Most of the old MARCH group dropped
out from that organization and waited to see
where I or they might go. In the meantime, I
was continuing my Task Force work, and my
Task Force connections were keeping doors
open as I began to dream up a new organization
and project. ...

5. Art, Work, and Health (1990-2007)

During the period of MIRA and for years afterward,
my struggle was going to be like being
thrown in hell. I was dealing with a series
of attacks or breakdowns. I was in and out of
hospitals, body- and mental-health facilities,
and halfway homes. There were times when I
had intense visions, when I walked the streets ...

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